Uppeldi og menntun - 01.01.2010, Qupperneq 50

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 19(1–2)/201050
KennSla Um orðHlUta eyKUr orðSKilning nemenda á yngSta Stigi grUnnSKÓlanS
meanings and see whether it is possible to teach young children about morphemes to
improve their vocabulary. The background to the project was a Government scheme
called “Clusters of Excellence” in which groups of schools collaborate with university
researchers in finding new ways of teaching children. The schools themselves decide
which topic they would like to concentrate on, and the university researchers make
suggestions for projects and give advice through the course of the research. We were
approached by a group of schools who wanted us to help them design new methods
of promoting children’s vocabulary. In conjunction with the teachers it was decided
to design an intervention programme based on morphology. The programme was
designed by Nunes and Bryant (2002) and is available in the CD “Discovering the
Secrets of Words”. The project as a whole involved children in Year 1 to Year 6. Many of
the schools chose to emphasise older year-groups, but two schools decided to include
Year 1 and Year 2 in the research as well. In this paper we will report the results for
these two year-groups.
The programme included 5 sessions and its main focus was on the morphological
structure of words and the semantic implications of different pre-fixes and suffixes.
The aim was to make the children aware that words are made up of individual
meaningful parts and to teach them how to use that knowledge to interpret novel
words. The intervention was always administered by the children’s teacher and was
delivered both to small groups of children (Study 1) and to a whole class (Study
2). There were two outcome measures, each administered three times: once before
the intervention began and then two times after the intervention was completed
with a 3 months interval. The hypothesis was that the children who were given the
intervention would make greater improvement between pre- and post-test in solving
these tests than would a comparable group of children who did not receive any
morphological training. This prediction was confirmed. The intervention group made
significant progress during the course of the study, both in defining pseudo-words and
recognising words composed of more than one morpheme. The Control group, on the
other hand, did not show any improvement on either test. As a whole, the results of
this study are very encouraging and demonstrate that young children are able to learn
about morphemes and they use that knowledge when they encounter morphologically
complex words and pseudo-words. They also suggest that morphological instruction
is effective not only when delivered to small groups of children in a tightly controlled
laboratory situation, but also when given to a whole class of pupils in their natural
school environment.
aBout tHE autHor
Freyja Birgisdóttir (freybi@hi.is) has a doctoral degree in developmental psychology
and works as a lecturer at the School of Education, University of Iceland. Her main
research interests concern the development of metalinguistic awareness and the
relationship between language and literacy. Correspondence concerning this article
should be addressed to Freyja Birgisdóttir, School of Education, Stakkahlíð, 105,
Reykjavík.